The winters were the toughest for finding work. Then the farms were all but shut down, jobs hard to come by. Still, he’d always managed to keep a roof over his head, traded for milking cows or feeding cattle, both of which had to be done year round. The barns where he slept offered a kind of continuity; the soft shuffle of animals and the smell of hay and manure were the same everywhere. It was the closest thing he had to home, and he slept deep and sound there whether he was on an apple farm in Wyoming or a cattle ranch in Montana.
He knew what people thought about the fact that he hadn’t been to school since he left home. He could see it in their eyes. That he was stupid, a loser. Deep down, he even wondered if they were right. His dad sure had thought so. But the truth is, he never did stop learning, and he had over a dozen library cards from all over the West. The long, cold nights of Winter were his favorite. Then he was sometimes the only farm hand on the payroll, and he’d finish chores for the night, sprawl across his bunk, and read until his eyes burned. When the library was too far from the ranches and farms where he was employed, he’d dig around the bunkhouse for whatever he could find, just as likely to come upon a back issue of Field and Stream as an old copy of The Sun Also Rises. Didn’t matter. He read what he could find, and while he knew it didn’t make him educated, exactly, he also knew he wasn’t dumb.
He’d taken the GED when he was sixteen and changed his name when he turned eighteen. The choice of Bodhi was a little ironic, since he was about as far from enlightened as anyone, but it had a kind of anonymity to it, and he liked the idea of being a faceless wanderer, searching for truth, rather than a former runaway without a single soul to care whether he lived or died. His new last name, Lowell, had been his mother’s, and the forgettable nature of it suited his purposes perfectly. He was tall, but not noticeably so, and while his years of ranch work had made him strong, his brown hair and eyes were nothing if not average. It was how he liked it. He was just passing through, had no desire to leave any trace of himself or form any attachments. The truth is, he hadn’t had much luck with people. His best interactions with them had come from a distance, and he planned to keep it that way.
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Contents
Primal
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
One
Two